Short hops and hard knocks with Red Sox beat writer Ian Browne.

Dry doubleheader

The rain is gone, and the Red Sox have sent a thank you note to Mother Nature. The way they are playing, and the way the Yankees are playing, the last thing they need are rainouts.

It’s amazing that this is the first time in club history the Red Sox have had a 10-game lead as early as May 19. Where do they go from here? They need to just keep pitching and stay healthy. This team is loaded.

We’ve seen everything around here the years except this. We’ve never seen the Sox just steamroll their way through a season. 1995 seems like a long time ago, and that year was sort of a fluke because of the 144-game season caused by labor strife. Besides, that team was swept in three straight by Cleveland in the playoffs. When I think of that team, I think of over-achievers like Troy O’Leary and Lee Tinsley. That team sort of did it with smoke and mirrors.

I repeat, this team is loaded. Is this to suggest the American League is over? Of course not. We’ve seen far too many crazy things to believe that. But the Red Sox have built themselves a mighty comfortable cushion.

Is Youkilis hot or what? I type that after watching him just crush one to center. And now, Manny fields one off the scoreboard and side-arm slings a perfect throw to second to nail Diaz trying to stretch a single. The replay did show that the runner was safe, but that doesn’t matter for the Red Sox now. When you’re hot, you also seem to bet every break.

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Dice looks like he’s in cruise control again today, pitching similarly to how he did in his last start against Detroit.

Don’t be shocked to see him throw another CG, 8 innings at the least with the way he’s going right now. That’s such a big lift to our already-rested bullpen, especially with all of the games coming up in such a short span.

I like the new version of Dice-K. He seems to be sinking his pitches to induce lots of grounders. Perhaps he has found a routine that suites him well, thus pitching effectively. No doubt he will go 9 if the pitch count is low with 2 more games coming up in the next 24 hours.

Anybody know why the game tonight is at 7:30? Don’t we usually play our night games at 7. On thursday we started at 7, but I guess the first one was at 12:30. Is it some weird Fox rule where no games can interfere with theirs?

It’s only the top of the 6th and the Braves are already using their 5th pitcher of the day. The Sox don’t necessarily have to hit the lights out against Smoltz tonight, just run his pitch count up with some good AB’s and get into that overworked Atlanta pen.

Anybody watching the Yankee game? Rasner goes down 2 batters into the game with some kind of hand injury. They will have no bullpen for our series in a few days. At least that gives their fans an excuse when they lose 2 or 3 of those games.

This seiris with the Braves is scerwed up. We were supposed to pitch Dice-K yesterday, but the game was rained out, this was an attempt to have Dice-K ready for the Yankees serisis, and an easy win over Lerew. Bad move. Right now the Braves are our ememy, the Yankees aren’t. It would have been a better desicion to pitch Hansack v. Lerew. Tonight we’ve seen it be hard to pull out a win v. Smoltz, and I doubt we will have luck v. Hudson. The shifting of the rotation was a bad move and it may cosy us the next two games.

rsjones, Dice-K was never supposed to pitch yesterday. Hansack was slotted for yesterday’s game vs Lerew and Dice-K this afternoon vs Smoltz.

Because of the rainout, Tito decided to move Hansack only and choose not to disturb Dice-k’s preparation for his afternoon start. But Bobby Cox decided to keep the same order, so Lerew pitched the 1st game and Smoltz the 2nd.

Well that second game was a complete bullpen implosion after Hansack left…

Well, chalk it up to a bad day and move on. Things like this will happen, and it’s good it happened while we’re quite up in the standings. I’d gather this happened cause our bullpen has gotten over-rested, heh.

We face Hudson tomorrow who is 3-7 with a 5+ ERA vs. us. Granted he’s been doing very well as of late, and it seems he’s finally made the transition to the NL and dominating (Pedro did it earlier with the Mets; however, Hudson’s been injured on and off the past season so hence why the domination wasn’t there), however he’s back in AL country and he doesn’t have a great record against us. So cross your fingers that we can get some runs on him early.

As for the rotation shuffle, that can’t cost us two games. Maybe it can, but saying it’s guaranteed to happen is pretty silly. Granted we’re not throwing Shill, Beckett, and Dice-K at the Yanks, I’m confident enough in our boys that we can come out with a series win.

Wake’s been effective, and while Schill hasn’t been great his last two starts, he’s pitching against the Yanks and he loves this stage. So I expect him to be ready to go. As for Julian, who knows? Its been amusing to guess how he’s going to do. :-)

Even if we lose the series vs. the Yanks, we’d still lead the AL East heading into Texas. And the Rangers are a slight mess at the moment. :-)

Ya brutal game out of the way. Hopefully Gabbard can come up big for us today. With the Yanks on the horizon it would be nice heading there on a winning note. As far as our bullpen goes, I’m not really liking the piniero singing. Not sure what his era is right now, but it seems he’s always the one giving up runs. I know the others weren’t sharp either, but atleast they have had more good days then not.

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